I've hit the DB performance bottleneck, where now?

Question

I have some queries that are taking too long (300ms) now that the DB has grown to a few million records. Luckily for me the queries don\'t need to look at the majority of this d

Answer 1

Considering a design change like this is not a good sign - I bet you still have plenty of performance to squeeze out using EXPLAIN, adjusting db variables and improving the indexes and queries. But you're probably past the point where "trying stuff" works very well. It's an opportunity to learn how to interpret the analyses and logs, and use what you learn for specific improvements to indexes and queries.

If your suggestion were a good one, you should be able to tell us why already. And note that this is a popular pessimization--

What is the most ridiculous pessimization you've seen?